The Perils of Obedience
ale3005 October 11th, 2007
Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist conducted a research study on obedience. He designed an experiment that forced participants either to violate their conscience by obeying immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. The levels of obedience found in each of the experiments was relatively higher than expected and it is amazing to see how each person that was being tested reacted to the experiment even though what they were asking of them implied hurting others. Milgram concludes that obedience is a basic element in the structure of social life, but I cannot see this as a conclusion because there are no ethics involved. Is obedience more important than ethics? I think that when obedience to an authority involves the lack of ethics and morals it can definitely interfere with the social structure and become aggressively dangerous.
